All that goes on with Catrìona Robertson in the magical Scottish historical fiction, Eyes of Garnet. Find out how Mary Duncan creates her characters and how she feels about the publishing world ... and other parts of the world, as well.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

The Dark Side

I wonder how many people have had experiences such as the night my husband and I were awoken because we couldn't breath. There seemed to be a dark presence sitting on our chests, pinning us to the bed. We could both "see" it in our mind's eyes; an angry black blob is the only way to describe it.

For hours we battled this thing, asking for the light forces to remove it from our space. It didn't belong here and the fact that it was actually interfering with us on the physical level is not allowed, in our books.

It finally did leave, but not after having to be ripped apart to make it see that what it was doing was totally wrong.

You see, the house we were renting for the winter was on a jut of land with a tidal river on the east and the open waters of Frenchman's Bay barely twenty feet to our south. And when it rained, we had a small stream run under the house, which was on pillars. This confluence of so much water created a large negative vortex on the property.

Ghosts wearing colonial dress were seen in my kitchen, and perhaps those going back before that time when the Native Americans used it for fishing grounds shadowed the spare bedroom.

When you walked past the guest house, the hair literally rose on your arms. All you felt was death, and worse. There didn't seem to be any way of clearing the house of gremlins, and in the dark, the place could hardly be spookier. It felt as though you walked through air thick and cold with crowds of those who'd passed, but hadn't left. It was a congregation of ghosts.

Some people wouldn't go near the place. Said it gave them the creeps. It certainly didn't look like a haunted house. It was the perfect summer vacation house on the coast of Maine. White clapboard two-story farmhouse with a great covered porch overlooking the ocean. The inside was all shiplap pine ceilings, dark wood paneled walls and wide pine floors. Each window had a view of the water and some amazing sunrises were seen from the bedroom.

But it wasn't lived in on a permanent basis. Many houses on the coast aren't. They remain vacant for most of the year; their owners using them for only a few weeks to a couple months during the year. This allows for displaced spirits to gather and call the place their own. They seem to know a good thing when they see it.

After doing some research, I found that the property once had a Revolutionary War era fort on it, and who knows what went on there. I had crystals everywhere to try and break up the negative energy in the house. Nothing you could do about the outside, though. Just too much area. At the end of our lease, we were happy to move on and leave the place to those who called it home.